best VGA in the market to run Second Life? 4 ASUS MARS GTX 285 or 2xGeForce GTX 295?

I am building a top computer mostly to run SL as smooth as posible and for some serious machinima action.

My dealer offered to me two options for the graphic card/s need:

ASUS MARS GTX 285
4GB

or

2 units of
GeForce GTX 295 (SLI)
2x 1.8 GB ( 3.6 GB TOTAL)



Other key components of the computer are:
12 GB RAM 2x3x2GB Corsair 1600 mhz (upgradable to 24GB when 2x3x4GB packs flow)
Fastest INTEL CPU available the day I pick the computer up
Top ASUS MB (I don't recall model)
XP >>> WINDOWS 7 as soon it hits the street

Which VGA option could work better with SL?

Anyone tried any of those VGA cards with SL?

I would appreciate any comments.

Thanks in advance.

It's overkill. But sometimes overkill is just kill enough.

I would suggest that even in applications that are written for SLI/Crossfire, there is a diminishing return as you increase GPUs. SL also does not use the full memory of these larger cards at the moment. Given the premium pricing of the Asus Mars and the inefficient scaling, the cost just isn't justified for running SL. There are cheaper options to increase performance.

If it were me, I would buy a single 285 (not the Asus Mars, just a solid card like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121332 ). If you can't max SL on that, add a second later.

Is there a reason that you are using a Pentium? With your budget, I would say get a Core i7 (easy to overclock, has memory controller on chip). Put that on an Asus workstation board with SAS controller ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131357 ) and then you can run SCSI HDDs in RAID 0 for a fast and reliable storage system.

hi Veritable!
Thanks for the detailed post.
First to say that in the CPU reference must be read INTEL, not PENTIUM. Me bad. I've just edited the mistake. At this moment the top CPU my dealer has in stock is:
Intel Core i7 Processor I7-870
If the day the computer is ready for pick up, he has a new one, it will be mounted it in its place.

In reference to the VGA:
ok, the 4GB ASUS VGA is out of contention... Even my dealer had no stock of it when I visited him (he had to order it). He had a lot of any of the other GTX cards in stock. So one less problem!

Do you think GTX285 could be better than GTX295?
One thing I would like to see is the SL worlds, not rezzing and unrezzing too often after I've arrived to them and they've totally rezzed. I would like to generate SL videos that they look like actual FPS games... that feeling.

The exact models of those VGA cards that my dealer has in stock are:

GTX2851
VGA GEFORCE XFX PCIE GTX285 648M 1GB DDR3
XFX
304.04 €

GTX2955
VGA GEFORCE XFX PCIE GTX295 648M 1792MB DDR3 DUAL DVI
XFX
439.76 €

I've just checked your MB suggestion. I will keep it in mind. Monday I wil talk to my dealer again to close the order. For HDD department I don't really feel the need of a super-secure/fast system. I won't handle commercial information or databases or anything too valuable with this computer. The targeted HDD was:
1.5 TB, 7.200 rpm, 32 MB (Maxtor or Seagate). Do you think something different could help to run SL faster and/or stronger?

One more thing to end.
In Spain most IPs limit the upload speeds to avoid P2P abuse. My internet speed atm is:
download speed 3804 kbps (upgradable)
upload speed 271 kbps (need a new IP to boost this one)

Could the pathetic upload speed cause a bottleneck for running SL or it is irrelevant?

The 295 is a better card, I just don't know that you will see the difference in SL. SL is not currently optimized for multi-gpu solutions. I do not know how well Nvidia's dual-GPU cards handle SL, but they will perform better than two of the same GPUs in SLI.

For the hard drives, the one you list is good, but you can speed up access time a bit by getting two drives and running them as a RAID 0 array to spread the transfers across two drives. Fastest solution is an SSD (just got one in my notebook, and loads are nearly instant). I am using a smaller (64 GB) SSD for Windows 7 and a few applications, and a 7200 RPM drive for data storage.

However, you will have killer hardware however you end up setting this up. Your biggest limitation right now is your network speed. SL cares more about download speed than upload, and your current rated connection speed is as much as the viewer can handle. However, you almost never get the rated speed. I would look into getting a faster download speed just to have some margin for error.

When, for the paltry sum of about $10K, you could run a sizeable portion of the SL Grid, And impress your friends at the next LAN Party . . .

Supermicro Unveils 4 Teraflop GPU Computing System

Super Micro Computer, Inc. has unveiled its dual Intel Xeon 5500 Series (Nehalem) processor-based 7046GT-TRF SuperWorkstations. These SuperWorkstations are the first to support four NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs as well as three additional PCI-e add-on cards for high-bandwidth I/O. These new systems also feature redundant Gold Level (93 percent+ efficiency) 1400-watt power supplies and quiet operation making them ideal for both enterprise and office supercomputing applications.

Supermicro 7046GT-TRF is a Tesla-based 4U Personal Supercomputer that brings cluster level performance to the desktop, dramatically increasing the pace of computational research. These SuperWorkstations feature multiple x16 non-blocking native Gen2 PCI-Express connectivity and are equipped with Supermicro's patented thermal design. The 7046GT-TRF is highly optimized for a wide range of graphics and computationally intensive applications in fields like medical imaging, oil and gas exploration, quantum chemistry, financial simulation, genomics and astrophysics.

The 7046GT-TRF is housed in Supermicro's new 4U rackmount convertible tower chassis, the SC747TQ-R1400. This chassis supports up to 11 full-height, full-length expansion cards, eight hot-swap 3.5 inch SAS/SATA drives, and special design features that are intended for graphics and computationally intensive applications. For more details on Supermicro 7046GT-TRF, visit www.Supermicro.com

Ok, the Nvidia 285GTX is simply an overclocked 280 and the difference in clock speed translates to maybe a frame per second increase. Save some cash and get a 280GTX. SLI gives no performance gain in SL, in fact it degrades performance in my experience so the Nvidia 295GTX is wasted. Of course there is nothing wrong with having a top performing video card and it can certainly be used in other games and applications that can take advantage of it.